I finally got around to upgrading the WordPress copy that powers Nusuni.com to version 2.2.1. If you find any bugs please let me know.

Thanks,
Jeremy Steele

Tip: Avoid these mistakes:

Lying About Their Traffic

One of the more humorous parts of Internet forums is how many people lie. Webmaster forums are a perfect example of that. It is just funny how many people go around claiming they run sites that get hundreds of thousands of hits each day, yet they never seem to post their URL.

What are they afraid of?

They are afraid of being exposed, that is all. Lying on the Internet is 10 times worse than lying in the real world - everything you say online can be found no matter how hard you work to erase it from history. Everything you do online leaves a paper trail.

Calling Less-Experienced People “Newbies”

Lately I’ve been getting in quite a few arguments with supposedly “good” SEOs on forums and IM sessions. Usually it goes along the lines of someone asks for some help, I post my thoughts, then some “expert” who claims they run several 1 million visitors/day sites goes on and says something along the lines of “Oh your such a newbie you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

O Rly? Why don’t those “experts” have constructive debates instead of going around calling people “newbies” for no reason at all. I’ll tell you why, they are idiots (and chances are, they are also liars, see #1).

True professionals don’t go around calling people “newbies”, they teach and talk.

Claiming They Are Professional When They Aren’t

Doing something as a career or having a college degree in the field doesn’t make you a professional. What makes you an expert is your experience. Someone who has been practicing for years will always be more experienced than someone who just got into the field. Don’t go around calling yourself a professional unless you truly are, it is as simple as that.

A few months back some dude asked me to help with a program he was writing. I told him to send over the source code so I could fix a bug, but he went on about how he was a professional and didn’t need to send me the code because I should somehow “magically” know what is causing the bug (don’t ask, his logic was severely flawed). Eventually I got him to send over the code, I fixed them bug, then two days later he said he became a professional programmer because his program was working.

My response was simply “Would you let a new doctor who claims they are a professional because they got a single ingrown nail-removal procedure done do work on your brain? I think not.”

What Is Their Username?!?!

I don’t know what some people are smoking, but they have got to toss that junk out. Usernames like “freecelephonesdotcom1″ and “freepornofmyselfandme4″ are not cool, they make you look incredibly shady, and they make you look like an idiot.

Yooo Man, Wazzzuppp!!!!

Not a big fan of people who call me “Yooo Man!!!!”. My name is Jeremy, not “Yooo Man!!!!”. It is even worse when they go all “Wazzzuuuuppppppppp?!?!?!?!” during chat also. That’ll earn ya a 1-way ticket to the ignore-users list. “hey, sup?” works, but “Wazzzzzuuuuppppp!!!” is just disgusting.

You’re A Professional Photographer But Those Are Your “Best” Photos???

It’s funny how many professional photographers have crap photos a 2-year-old could do on their web site. If they actually make money doing photography, then I could become a millionaire doing that stuff.

Guess I Won’t Join Your Site!

A few days ago some blog directory spammed me about 7 times with an e-mail. Yeah, that isn’t the best way to get someone to stay with or join your service, is it?

You’re A Professional Programmer Who Can’t Show Me Your Work?

One reason I prefer working on closed-source projects alone is because of some rather unfortunate experiences I’ve had in the past while asking people for help. For example, a while back I asked someone who claimed they were a programmer for some example work, just so I knew what they could do before he joined in my project. He “couldn’t” show me any work due to a “computer glitch.” What an “unfortunate” time to have a “computer glitch”, eh pal?

As you can probably guess (but I’ll say it anyway), he wasn’t hired.

Wait, You Run Google’s Servers?

This is a really funny one. Some guy IMed me around midnight and wanted to talk with me about server administration, he claimed he worked for Google and did a lot of their server maintenance. Now, that made me think he was a liar from the get-go, but I still went along with it just for a good laugh.

About 5 minutes later he asked me what the best webserver is, because he hadn’t ever set one up before. He wasn’t even a good professional liar.

Posting Nude Pictures

Ahh, the classic “post a nude picture” type of mistake. As you probably know, a lot of fools on MySpace do that. All it takes in 3 minutes to find some ridiculous topless picture of a prostitute on there.

It is even worse when someone makes a username like “hotchick102″ on a geek forum and has a picture of Pam Anderson as their avatar.

It’s just stupid, but I guess it works or else they wouldn’t do it. But really, who the heck are the idiots clicking on their links? I wouldn’t click them from a mile away, would probably get some disease or something.

The United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has said “no” to changing a terms of service without notification, even if the user agreed to that. I wouldn’t expect this ruling to stand for too long for two reasons: #1, pretty much every ToS ever made has that clause in it, and #2, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is the most liberal court in the U.S., and they regularly ignore Supreme Court precedents and regularly have their rulings overturned by the Supreme Court.

I’ll give it a few weeks, possibly a month or two, until this ruling goes into the rubbish bin.

By the way, this is the same court that said “Under God” doesn’t belong in the Pledge of Allegiance.

For a while now I’ve been thinking about changing the slogan from “Random Rants of a Rambling Computer Nerd” to something else. Because of some wonderful feedback on the authority blogger forums, I decided to go ahead and change it.

So, it will no longer be “Random Rants of a Rambling Computer Nerd” Instead, it’ll be “SEO and Blogging and News, Oh My” Still catchy, and it gives first-time users a good idea of what is on here.

I’m also tweaking a few other things to help improve the user-experience here. If you have any ideas feel free to drop a comment.

During the “8 random facts” tagging game I mentioned I have lost 10 pounds by cutting out some extra snacks each day. Well, now I’m going to lose 10 more pounds.

No more soda.

That’s right, no more. I’m done. I’m going to do a post each Friday (starting next Friday) with a list of the days and whether or not I made it without soda.

I also challenge you to do the same, for at least a week. Because it would be so easy for someone to lie about it, there won’t be any sort of contest prizes, but surely better health is a good enough prize?

Heck, after I lost those first 10 pounds I felt like a new person, it’ll be nice after I lose these next 10 pounds…

After this extra fat is off, I may try to tackle my addiction to popcorn (which somehow evaded my previous attempt to cut out all junk foods).

The other day a quote popped up on a spam e-mail I had received. It was a classic “buy this stock” letter and looked like all the others, except for this single paragraph:

No matter which way you ride it is uphill and against the wind

I thought about that for like 5 minutes and realized something that shocked me, the quote is as true today as it was 10 years ago (eek, I was only 8!). It is a “timeless” idea that will never fade away, and it can be applied to everything, even professional blogging.

Whenever I look at bloggers like Darren Rowse or Steve Pavlina all I can think of is, “damn, they are inhuman.” They are like robots. It is just amazing how much content they write.

As we all know, the way they got there was through extremely hard work (months/years of it, before making any real amount of money) and they sacrificed their free time. Their journey was uphill, and now they are finally at the peak enjoying the view.

Right now I’m stuck on the middle of the hill. Nusuni.com has some fairly good content, but the problem is with traffic building and increasing the readership. There is still a really long way to go, but at least I’ve gotten the really easy (and annoying) stuff out of the way (picking topics, getting used to writing a lot of posts, etc).

I think most bloggers are stuck at the same point. How is that extra step taken, how do you step over the boundary that separates the little guys from the a-listers, and how do you know if you should take an opportunity or ignore it?

It is obvious what separates the destined-to-fail bloggers from the ones who will become professionals. The bloggers who will fail give up too easily, and the bloggers who will make it are extremely determined, and they’ve learned to trust their gut instinct.

I suppose how optimistic you are also plays a large role in the grand scheme of things. It amazes me how many bloggers I talk to are incredibly pessimistic and are always talking about giving up on blogging. Because I am not yet a professional blogger (haven’t finished the journey up the hill yet), I won’t go around saying “you can be successful in blogging by doing this, this, and that”. Instead I will tell them what I tell people who complain about programming being too hard to do, if you are unhappy with something then change it. If you hate doing something you don’t have to do, then don’t do it.

I think it amazes them how I can have a week with an average of 300 unique visitors every day, then get a random week with only 50/day and still be happy. I think that having a positive attitude will be what pushes me to take that final step onto the part-time professional blogger platform, then take another step up to the full-time arena.